News & Views
Obituary to Life on Earth
To the king of beasts, we thank you for gracing the savannahs with your regal presence. Through our greed and ambitions we claimed your kingdom as our own, converting it to a lifeless monoculture to feed our growing populations.
To the Ganges river dolphin, we thank you for gracing the flowing waters with your playful energy. Sadly our industries and excesses gradually soiled your home making it too toxic to sustain life.
To you rhinos, we apologise for our ignorance and misguided superstitions that lead to your demise...together with our self-centred belief that our own individual health was more important than yours and that of future generations.
To the honey bee, it seems that we thanked you for your sweet gifts by denying you the variety of blossoms that you depended on and by poisoning you with our pesticides...we stood by watching as these ravages went on to devastate your communities and immunity.
To the majestic elephant, we say thank you for revealing the depth of our own vanity and conceit as we brought about your demise by claiming your wonderful teeth for ourselves. Somehow we believed they were more beautiful as our ornaments and jewellery than they were gracing your noble faces.
To the orangutan, our gentle and humble cousin, palm oil was largely at the root of your demise… a substance that we weren’t even aware of consuming… just another ingredient in so many of our ‘products’ that we consumed to excess and largely without appreciation. It’ll be little comfort to you to hear that we are all now suffering the consequences of the loss of the rain forests.
As we lie here gasping our last breaths in this field of destruction of our own making, we are sorry to ourselves - for believing we were cleverer than we actually were, for believing we were special, for believing we had rights, for believing a God was favouring us and granting us a custodial role.
To the human, I for one miss you. The mess that you left behind actually suited me for a while. But now, it seems that there is no longer the variety of life necessary to rebuild and balance things rapidly enough and we’ve descended too low into the melting pot. Even the bacteria and fungi are struggling. Despite our own adaptability and rapid reproductive rate, we too can’t survive these extremes that came on so quickly… so sadly, it’s ‘goodbye’ from me, the cockroach.